It turns out that religion doesn’t just make people feel safer in places of worship. “We know a lot about risk factors but not a lot about protective factors,” Baylor professor Byron Johnson said of criminal justice statistics in a recent appearance at the Family Research Council. “Religion is a protective factor.”

Johnson is the author of More God, Less Crime. “As religiosity goes up, crime goes down,” he averred at the FRC.

Johnson is in the vanguard of a small, but growing, number of social scientists studying the links between lower crime rates and increased church attendance and religious observance. His efforts give us an example of how to affect positive change in academia: “All it takes is a handful of scholars if they are dedicated,” he said at the FRC.